Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I gave the historical background for this one already in my last post on Death Satellite. Keep in mind that game was first advertised in Your Computer in June, and this game was first advertised in September. While several months is not absurd for writing a 1982-era adventure game, the fast turnaround does mean this one might be more a cash-grab than the last.

Your Computer, September 1982.

Your goal is to “solve the problem of the Astrological Adventure” which is terribly vague, but I have a guess it just means you have to make it to whatever room is designated as The End. (CASA Adventure Archive claims something about six treasures, but I think that’s about an entirely different game also called Zodiac.)

The start, as shown above, made me think it was an Arctic Adventure lost-in-the-wild type situation, but in addition to ice-related antics the theme falls into having a sequence of rooms (with ones in between) named after the Zodiac. This leads nearly to abstraction-as-environment, with places like

THE HOUSE OF GEMINI
THE TWINS ARE HIDING SOMETHING

which I suppose you get to visualize any way you like. In a way, this is simply embracing the purity of the crossword in the crossword-vs-narrative battle. Adventure game entirely as challenge.

And wurf, it is unfortunate it has challenge, because there is no walkthrough, hint sheet, etc. I made a decent stab, as you’ll see, but I eventually got stuck. One thing that helped a bit to start was being able to find a chink in the parser. When the game says

I DON’T UNDERSTAND

it means the words being used aren’t in the game’s vocabulary (both verb and noun). If either verb or noun is recognized, the game says

YOU CAN’T

unless the action goes through. This fouled up my usual verb-testing strategy at first, where I’d go through each potential verb, like PUSH, PULL, etc. and apply them to a random object in the game. Here, if you type PULL TORCH, the game gives a YOU CAN’T even though PULL isn’t even a recognized word. The right way to test verbs is to simply type them with no object at all.

As shown, software-artifact-as-puzzlebox as opposed to any kind of narrative.

This yielded me a list of:

CUT, DIG, READ, DRINK, EAT, KILL, LIGHT, RUB, UNLOCK, WAVE, WEAR

Things were smooth up to what is the first puzzle (*), at Taurus. I had gathered an ICE PICK, a RED FISH, a KNIFE, a TORCH, and an URN (which I left behind because of a four-item inventory limit and the fact the urn smashes if you drop it).

At least I had company; a 1983 review published in Home Computing Weekly #24 writes:

One of the most difficult is how to get past the bull in the House of Taurus – a problem which I wrestled with for a long time, along with a friend who has the same program.

I should have looked at the text here more carefully, this had a hint! I was heavily stuck here and thought, perhaps, I’d have to just throw in the towel already and make a post, but I decided to pop the program open in a text editor to see if I could glean anything (machine code, not BASIC, so not 100% readable unfortunately).

There wasn’t much plaintext (I guess they did some encryption for contest purposes) but I found more verbs:

GIVE, MELT, WRESTLE, LEAVE

I’m slightly sheepish I didn’t have GIVE on my list on verbs to check, but come to think of it, that’s not been a common word for the two-word parser (lots of DROP standing in for GIVE).

Seeing WRESTLE made me remember when I had to wrestle an octopus in Haunt. (The reviewer wrestled with the problem a long time, ha.)

Unfortunately there wasn’t too much more to go past that. I found a magic ring stuck in ice where MELT ICE worked, as per the newly-found verbs, and I met the Gemini twins I tagged earlier and gave them a fish; they traded me a key.

More a matter of “try all the verbs” than “thinking”.

There was a slightly classical maze hiding an axe…

The start room is a “trap” of sorts that gathers two of the one-way exits from the maze room right before the axe, trying to deny hitting the solution randomly. This is quite typical; what’s unusual is making the exit room also a “trap” (on the bottom, three of the exits leave the maze) so it is easier to accidentally bypass the axe and leave. The priority for many of these mazes was to avoid solves just by meandering in random directions. Even Don Woods with Adventure made a test diagram to make sure “simple repetitive actions” would not allow getting through his maze too early.

…but other than that all I had left to fiddle with was a sleeping dragon.

I may end up having to call the game quits here, unfortunately; I’ll still give it a few more swings given I’m already past the “break open the actual code to look for clues” point.

I will say I can RUB the magic ring I found in the ice (the game tells me NOTHING HAPPENS in all circumstances) and any verb/object combo I’ve thrown at the dragon has been met with I CAN’T. I also haven’t been able to get anywhere with DIG in any room. Surely there’s a break somewhere?

(*) Almost the first puzzle. Entering the House of Aries requires going up the glacier, and I didn’t know until about my 5th iteration that the ice pick was required; otherwise I was holding it so it got used automatically without the game telling me. Solving a puzzle by default, essentially. This has the interesting side effect that since the maze has an exit that loops you to the start of the game, if you’ve dropped the ice pick in the interim (say, using it to map a room in the maze) your game gets softlocked since you can’t go back up the glacier to return to the maze.